My interview with
Robert Kramer and John Douglas took place at the Cannes Film Festival,
May 17, 1975. We talked about their film, MILESTONES, which was shown
there as part of the Critics’ Fortnight series.

Robert Kramer, born
in 1940, was one of the founders of Newsreel and has made six films: FALN,
a documentary about American imperialism in Venezuela, 1966; IN THE COUNTRY,
1966, THE EDGE, 1968, and ICE, 1970, three features about the growth of
the New Left; PEOPLE'S WAR, a documentary made in Vietnam at the invitation
of the North Vietnamese with Douglas and Norman Fruchter, 1969; and MILESTONES,
with Douglas, 1975. In 1970, he and Douglas were part of a political collective
in Putney, Vermont. At present Kramer lives in California where he is
completing a new film on Portugal and Angola.

John Douglas, born
in 1938, was a civil rights worker for SNCC in the South in the 1960’s
and was one of the early members of newsreel. He has made four films:
STRIKE CITY, a documentary about a group of black farmers in Mississippi,
1966; SUMMER 68, a documentary about radical Movement activity in the
U.S. culminating in the Chicago 68 Convention, 1968; PEOPLE'S WAR, with
Kramer and Fruchter, 1969; and MILESTONES, with Kramer, 1975. At present
Douglas lives in New York City.

MILESTONES was written
and directed by Kramer and Douglas; produced by Barbara and David Stone;
shot by Douglas; lighting by Philip Spinelli; sound by Spinelli and Jane
Schwartz; research and sound editing by Marilyn Mulford. It’s in l6 mm
color; 195 minutes long.

••••••••

LEVIN: What first
gave you the idea for MILESTONES? It seems it was a film that grew organically.”

DOUGLAS: It came
after four or five years when we hadn't made any films at all. After working
in Vermont, we got to a place where we had to look at our own lives in
terms of what we were going to do. Filmmaking was something that we had
been really close to and was something that we could rely on in a certain
way, given the confusion of that time. We'd lived and worked together
for a long time. We'd worked on PEOPLE'S WAR together with Newsreel, and
that in certain ways, had been this really strong and clear period of
time for us. We tried to bring together different aspects of the past
period we had initially felt to be really clear and strong, and show how
lives had grown through that period of time. We wanted to piece together
those different parts of our lives in a way that seemed to represent a
growth and development in a whole different aspect of political work.

LEVIN: Are you saying
that you wanted the film to explore what had happened to you and your
friends, and people like yourselves, during that period of not making
films?

KRAMER: Well, yes,
if you want to say that we make films out of our lives. It’s like one
of the characteristics of how we end up defining filmmaking for ourselves,
which is that the scope of the film is the scope of our concerns. It’s
not like a product. We mine what we're living through. And that’s been
true for the other films and documentaries we've made—that they're
basically concerned with whatever our experience was at that time. A lot
of people say that the 70s is like a time of falling away from political
militancy. There’s a sense in which that’s true—if the emphasis
is put on the word militant, and a strong, sustained confrontation with
the powers that be.

But there’s another
sense in which that’s not true, because we came to a dead end, and it
seemed as though we couldn't continue to be militant in that same way.
That’s to say we didn't have the stamina. We didn't have even a perspective
that could carry us through. What certainly began for us was a period
of time which represented a falling away from day-to-day political work
as we had defined it before.

We traveled a lot,
and got a better sense of what was going on around us everyday. At the
same time we began to reclaim our personal history. As we got a better
sense of what was going on around us every day, that was reflected in
all the traveling in the film. Personally, it was the first time I had
spent a lot of time traveling in the United States.

LEVIN: When you first
started going around the country visiting, were you shooting?

KRAMER: No. We were
just traveling, going to Glacier, stuff like that. We're really talking
about this whole period when we basically stopped doing anything and weren't
making a movie. We were finding ways to live, doing what we had to do
to live; but we were traveling a lot, bumming around. And it wasn't always
together—it was in different combinations of people. And part
of that process was the splitting up of our collective and just getting
out.

The second thing
is the claiming of our personal histories in terms of our families. In
a lot of ways—earlier—we had to find our political life
in a way that cut us off, say from our parents, from our own earlier experiences
which we had denied. It seemed that militant politics back then had rejected
all that. And so for me anyway, it was really important to reclaim my
past, and to think about the different kinds of importance that culture
had, that poetry had for me—the really striking discoveries, for
example, of how important the Beat Poets had been, how important Ginsberg
had been for me personally. It’s just that none of it fit in with our
politics at the height of our activity. Then suddenly discovering that
the importance of these things was way beyond the limits of the politics
and culture that I had been a part of was really crucial ... and the relationship
to my parents and.. even the relationship to what had been good in my
education, which I had thought about only in negative terms. A lot of
that is reflected in the film in the sense of families, of people trying
to find ways to get back into contact with their parents—and with
each other—and to explore that past.

DOUGLAS: I was rejecting
my son, who was a year old at that point, and so there was a period of
time that I lived with him. That was like eight or nine months of trying
to piece together what hat relationship was about, because prior to hat
there was no way for me to deal with that at all. There was no way to
even prepare for that reality.

RAMER: And I had
been rejecting a very deep and important relationship that I had been
unwilling to wrestle with in a new way. I had just been ignoring completely
my sort of complete isolation.
Then the third thing is reclaiming our beginning—which is a process
that’s really only beginning to pick up now—beginning to reclaim
our history in America, in the sense that there is an American history
of opposition to imperialism that’s much deeper and broader than we knew.

A concrete example
is the Communist Party, which I have no special love for, but which I
had no knowledge about at all during the 60s—it’s just that there
were very heroic periods in the party’s history. And that’s a history
shared by zany, many other groups which had a strong and militant resistance
that preceded ours—and we had arrogantly felt that we were the
first ones who had said, “This is fucking shit.” But now to
begin to understand that we're the children of that past and there were
things for us to learn from that. The reflection of that in the movie
is, say, the old woman at the beginning, that immigrant history. So the
film emerges out of that period.

I was in New York
doing mostly aikido, which is sort of like tai chi, and we didn't have
any plans, but finally we generated this script. The script doesn't have
a story. It builds up from all the fragments of the things we've been
doing.

DOUGLAS: It came
out of people, ideas, situations that we wanted to see in the movie, people
that we had lived with, had been close to.

KRAMER: Our method
of working was basically we kept a file over a period of six months in
which every time there was an image or a bit of dialogue or a thought
or a character that appeared, we'd just put the bit of paper into the
folder and never even bother to look at it. Then one day I sat down and
sent John a 50-page packet, which was nothing more than these images in
an arbitrary order determined in an hour by throwing them on three different
piles. Then we didn't do anything for another few months, just talked
about it all, and made a few more notes. Then, at a crack, we sat down
and tried to do a thing some kind of film could come out of.

How much is script
and how much is verite? It’s hard to give percentages—but you
could say that overwhelmingly the film is scripted. But the film is not
cinema verite, is not a documentary, in that sense. Scenes like the old
woman in the beginning aren't scripted, but we asked all the questions
and we sometimes told her what we wanted her to say. And we shot enough
footage so we could basically compose her. The historical footage around
her doesn't relate to her at all—I mean it’s not from her life.
In fact it’s a free mixture of some photographs from her life with material
from the immigrant past.

LEVIN: Okay. The
cost of the film, where the money is from, the distribution of the film,
what’s going to happen with that, and why and how is the film at Cannes
and why are the two of you at Cannes. To take a few questions at one time.

DOUGLAS: David and
Barbara Stone, whom we had worked with in Newsreel, they found $30,000
from London—where they live now. That was like a whole chunk to
start making a movie with. The film finally cost maybe twice that much.

KRAMER: About the
distribution—there are a lot of problems with that; the length,
the content, the style. The best that we could hope for in distribution
is that the film would open in New York, get good reviews there and then
go to perhaps eight other major cities in the kind of theatre that could
support that kind of film, and stay in those theatres for a while and
do well; and then have a broad university and community distribution.
Unless there was something really surprising, that’s what we could hope
for. The way the system is set up now, it’s still based on this high regard
for Europe, so in order to get into a New York theatre and make some kind
of a deal, we basically have to have same kind of credentials for the
film—unless we had a lot of money to buy a house, which we don't.

So you come to Europe.
That’s one of the traditional underground film strategies, and it’s the
one our distributor knows best anyway and is best suited for us. So the
way it’s working is real simple: Cannes is the most important festival—it’s a total marketplace, and at the same time there’s a high
degree of critic’s attention. So here we are in Cannes, and the film will
open in Paris in the fall. But the most important things are the reviews
that come out of Cannes and the possibility that it will go into something
like the New York Film Festival—which we don't know about yet—and then right from there into a New York theatre. [MILESTONES
was subsequently in the New York Film Festival—GRL]

So that’s the reason
the film is in Cannes. And the reason we're in Cannes is our pact with
the film. Basically it’s a personal favor to Barbara and David (Stone).
It’s been very interesting, because we've had a very privileged existence
as filmmakers: we've been in a position where we haven't had to raise
the money that much ourselves; we've been lucky to have producers, distributors
who have supported us down the line, and we haven't had much relationship
with the whole machinery that makes the film industry run. So though I
feel that it’s terrible here—it’s almost unredeemed at any level—it’s been very important to be here. At one point it was explained
to us that our being here was like another 50,000 admissions in Paris.

DOUGLAS: It’s part
of the reality of getting a film distributed on this level, which we haven't
taken on in that way in the past.

KRAMER: Another thing
that’s sort of related to that: one of the characteristics of the people
in the film is that they're not actually connected to society, or to the
economic base of society in a clearly definable way. They have jobs and
everything else, but they have an almost lumpen lifestyle in which they
drift. In a sense that’s true for us as filmmakers in that we haven't
had any relationship either to the financing or the distribution of these
films, although we did in the case of Newsreel. Now the other step is
that we don't have a relationship to the world of filmmakers. I don't
know many. filmmakers, John doesn't know many. In the last five years
we have not talked to filmmakers. And one of the things that’s come up
here is the question of what is our responsibility as filmmakers.

DOUGLAS: Each of
us tried to talk with filmmakers before we left the country, because in
our past experiences we had been connected to a political group of filmmakers,
and the work on this film has been in incredible isolation.

LEVIN: One of the
things implicit in what you've been saying is that before, when you made
films. for Newsreel, there was an alternate distribution system, and now,
in effect, what you've done is gone over to a commercial distribution
system. What do you see in the implications of that switch?

KRAMER: It’s not
quite the case, because Newsreel was actually supported by commercial
distribution. From the very start, Barbara and David Stone had the knowledge
to place Newsreel films in theatres in these eight cities, to move them
in universities. It’s not strictly like a commercial distribution, but
it’s definitely in the l6mm market—and also in Europe. So the
hidden financing of Newsreel was the ability to actually move the films
commercially. And we therefore were able to spend all our time on non-commercial
distribution, on what you could call political distribution.

Can we make films
that will really say what we want to say, and can they really go into
theatres, and can we do even better than MILESTONES? I mean, hasn't MILESTONES
raised the question for us of still holding back, the obscurity of the
form, that there seem to be ways to open that material to other people
in another film? The problem, very simply, for me, is that if we're going
to be filmmakers and we do films all the time, somehow we can solve those
problems. But if films serve the function of coming up every three or
four years as a way of assessing all the material that we've lived through,
and sorting it out in that way, we won't be able to do it.

LEVIN: Have you made
any decisions about future plans, about whether you're going to be fulltime
filmmakers or whether you're going to go on being politically involved
people who sometimes make films?

KRAMER: We don't
have any real plans. What is clear is that it would be terrific if we
were invited to the Republic of South Vietnam now, and we were able either
to assist them, or ourselves make a film, say in a small village, which
actually documented in some detail the incredible upheaval of people actually
being able to take power into their own hands, it would be such an amazing
film to make and it would be such a joy to be any part of something like
that. But that’s like out there, and the reality of it is that we don't
have any plans—or that I don't have any plans.

DOUGLAS: At this
point I feel we really want to find some way to continue to work on films
for some period of time. That was part of the commitment to work on this
film—which I don't see as an isolated film—but tine to
really explore that as a commitment. No so much in terms of my making
films, but really trying to see how we can continue to work on films,
and to find a group of people to work on films that need to be made at
this point.

LEVIN: The earlier
films were propaganda films, they wanted to make a point, to say that
America did this, that or the other thing, as in Vietnam, and that this
was bad news. The political purpose in that sense is not clear in this
film, MILESTONES, and presumably you're still interested in those same
political problems, and in that same political way of dealing with life
and making films. So, in what way do you see MILESTONES as being politically
relevant?

KRAMER: The way into
it in this case is somehow through people’s lives, through people’s lived
experiences in the attempt to expose the choices that we've made and what
they mean within the context of America right now. That’s important political
work. Now there are a lot of different questions. One of them is like
the particular class of the people involved: basically déclassé middle class people. I mean they're for the most part white In white America,
and the choice to focus on them is again a choice to say that we're going
to make a film about the reality that we know. If we claimed the film
was a political declaration, then we'd be in a lot of trouble, because
we haven't filled out the whole spectrum.

DOUGLAS: I think
it’s interesting that when we finished MILESTONES that the Vietnamese
were victorious, simultaneously; it’s coincidence. I feel that we're now
pushed into a whole new space, that we were pushed into a whole new space
a couple of years ago in relationship to like seeing how we could identify
and work clearly politically.

But the trouble spots
were our lives, our reality and our relationship to the society. And I
think that in a lot of ways that that’s one thing the film really, really
makes clear—the real isolation, the incredible inability to be
clear about what those choices should be; but at the same time talk about
the real problems that people have to deal with and solve in their own
lives. In other words, it was the first time that we had been able to
deal with that, and not just in our film, but even in our own lives on
a certain level. So I think of the film as valuable, as honest to the
extent that it opens up some of the real and deeper problems of our lives.

LEVIN: It also relates
to what you said at the conference after the showing of the film the other
night, that when you made films for Newsreel, you made films within a
political structure, and that now you have no political structure, and
you're making films simply as private persons who have to make personal
decisions as to the film. Isn't that problem in making the film in effect
one of the problems presented in the film?

DOUGLAS: That’s right.

KRAMER: But it’s
all one piece, sc that basically, dependent on the mood we were in, if
you ask what’s the political significance of the film, we might say, we
make no claims for its political significance because the space that it
grew out of was the space in which that was the basic question—what
is the political significance of our lives? And that’s the guilt that
basically everyone in the film experiences at one level or another.

DOUGLAS: The openness
of the dialogue in the film, the dialogue between two people, constantly,
could be almost a dialogue between the two filmmakers because of their
isolation.

KRAMER: And the clear
politics that grew out of the 70’s couldn't be carried forward because
of our own limitations. It’s the responsibility of revolutionaries to
claim all the good things in the world, in the revolution, not to make
lives that rule it out, not to say, you can't have beautiful films, for
example. You can have beautiful films and be a revolutionary. It was an
error of Newsreel to believe that to proletarianize was to uglify.

There’s a wonderful
thing in a book on Cuba, an argument very early in the revolution because
America had withdrawn all of the glass producing materials, about what
should Cuban glass look like. The first thing they came up with were all
kinds of pissy yellow, and it was one position in the Central Committee—it became a Central Committee issue—that that was fine
because there were a lot of other things that had to be done. But Che
took the position that revolution is not about ugliness and they carried
on through—it was a specific technological problem—until
they had finally produced a kind of glass that didn't turn everything
into this milky, unappetizing sort of thing.

LEVIN: In the late
60’s and early 70’s there seemed to be a clear crisis situation, and there
seemed to be something to focus on, work toward, and it seemed as if people
were really moving forward, changing things. But that focus seems to be
lost now, dispersed. In a sense a lot of that movement and the ideas have
been co-opted, right? And our politics don't seem to be anywhere near
as clear as they were. What a lot of people seen to have ended up with
is a personal life style. It’s not meant as a reproach, but I don't see
that the film deals with that.

KRAMER: I don't agree
with that. It seems to me that in a certain sense there is far more crisis
in America than ever before, that imperialism has entered its final crisis,
and that we're going to be called upon to carry out much clearer tasks
now. The second thing is that I think we have a better politics now than
we ever had before, that we're at the beginning of a really rich anti-imperialist
politics. And I think that elements of that politics are in the film.
What’s missing in the film is the specific struggle against the state,
and it’s absolutely true that that’s a failure of the film—there’s
no question about it.

I guess it’s not
there because it took the making of the film to realize what had fallen
out of our lives—and one of the sections is all about that. But
I think it’s still wrong to think that the film doesn't address that,
because what the film describes is the situation where people choose not
to make that fight. It’s a small investigation about a large group of
people in the United States who have been a very important force over
the last fifteen years.

And I think that
one of the things that the film also reflects is a real attempt to change
the idea of who our friends and enemies are—and that really has
to be a foundation of our politics. That’s why you really need a creative
Marxism-Leninism. You need a scientific tool, the beginning of some kind
of mechanism for actually being able to dissect a situation so you can
figure out in some objective way who you should be working with and who
you shouldn't be working with. And the answer becomes that you should
be basically working with almost everybody and hating very few people.

After so many years
of struggle, the revolutionary government comes into Saigon and declares
amnesty for everybody except for a very, very few. That’s really a tremendous
lesson. It’s not just about forgiveness or humility, it’s about science,
an understanding that people can change.